We spend so much time in the waiting room of life, anticipating a future in which the conditions will be right for us to take action.
The first snow fell today, in silent sprinkles. I am watching its flakes drift and glide in a zig-zag as they fall, in a manner similar to leaves.
I am surprised by the thought of thousands of perfectly formed crystals falling from the sky against the bright grey-white light of the winter morning.
Snow, where I live, is the harbinger of change.
Its arrival means that winter nature will be asleep soon, that Christmas is around the corner and that the clock will soon tick over into a new year.
While a new year is a somewhat arbitrary marker in life’s path, it is significant because we make it so.
I ask myself this morning – how do you face a new year without some nostalgia or regret? It must be possible, but how?
I think the answer is in a daily feeling of “nowness”, or mindfulness in today’s vernacular. I have successfully integrated meditation into my life, mostly due, in an amusing twist, to technology. A dear friend introduced me to the Calm app on my phone and my Garmin watch has a feature where it measures my stress and suggests that I breathe. Both the daily meditation from Calm and the breathing helps me to find my centre for the day, or grants a moment’s respite during a stressful hour.
As some of my readers may know, I am a liberal and progressive, yet faithful Roman Catholic. As such, I have always tried to incorporate daily prayer into my life, with varying success and at different levels of intensity over the years. I find that mechanical repetition of prayer becomes a chore rather than something I look forward to, so have sought to find ways of approaching prayer more mindfully, more contemplatively.
One of the methods I use, is listening to Taizé music. These simple, repetitive chants are very similar to the mantras sung by yogis. The Taizé Community is an ecumenical movement that invites all Christian orders to unite in song and contemplation. Taizé songs are sometimes so beautiful that they bring tears to my eyes, making me feel a great emotional release and spiritual uplift. They seem to open a door to the sanctuary of transcendent feeling that comes of gaining a glimpse of the reflected, warm golden light of love.
Another method that I have used with success is the Ignatian daily examen. This method of practical prayer and contemplation was prescribed by St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Order of Jesuits. The examen is simple, yet elegantly effective. At the end of the day, take a moment to:
1. Become aware of God’s presence.
2. Review the day with gratitude.
3. Pay attention to your emotions.
4. Choose one feature of the day and pray from it.
5. Look toward to tomorrow.
Obviously, this is a religious approach to mindfulness and that won’t work for many. I do encourage you to check out Taizé and the Ignatian Examen as both can be practised and enjoyed in a secular, fashion as well.
I have found going through this can help open the door to self-examination and awareness. I have found that being in this state can avoid nostalgia and regret in those moments when we become aware of the flight of time’s arrow. They make us more aware of where the arrow is leading us.
Indeed, they possibly allow us to be in sync with our actions enough that we mindfully and willfully shoot an arrow into the future with each of our actions, confident that it will land in a future place that we will be one day happy to inhabit.